Organisations today overlook placing human development issues appropriately high on the agenda

Dear Editor, Yvonne Sam’s letter in SN of October 13, 2018 `Who is listening to the male cry’ was a most poignant plea (as it could come from a mother for a son who needs help).

Arguably the environment she describes is more than a domestic one. For there are comparable stressors in the work place, for males, to which experience one can refer as a young human resources officer as far back as in the sixties.

In the expatriate owned sugar industry at the time, there was this demeaning descriptor of a work group on estates referred to as the ‘boy gang’.

For a newcomer to the environment, it was difficult to reconcile such a descriptor with the age of the (adult) gang representative who turned out also to be head of the local Hindu community.

As a consequence of my assertive protest to the Head Office management team, the ‘boys’ were afterwards recognised literally as ‘Male Weeders’.

This incident is merely one of several examples of the deliberate manner with which we in organisations interact with one another, moreso between different levels of the job hierarchy. The manager insists on posturing as a manager – distancing himself even from colleague managers; and moreso from the level of manager below, and worse, from the non-management cadre; while often also grappling with his/her own insecurities.

In today’s world of sensitive communication, such behaviour is clearly counter-productive. For the reality is that too many are overwhelmed by stressors which they bring to the workplace – not unlikely the one place where they develop partnerships, if not full friendships. In the process of an eight-hour day, and at least a forty-hour week, opportunities arise for sharing, and being supportive of one another. Over time it becomes the one place he/she could function with a modicum of familiarity and self-confidence.

In the same breadth therefore, it is the very place where he/she when in a state of doubt seeks to turn for help, for advice, indeed for counselling. It is exactly within this sensitive context that the manager/supervisor has a critical role to play.

Indeed, it was as a result of his rather comprehensive evaluation of the physical and social stress which sugar workers were continually undergoing, that Jock Campbell, a former observant apprentice at Albion Estate Berbice, who, on his accession to the Chairmanship of the vast Booker empire of Companies in the 1950s, declared the empathetic mission statement: ‘People are more important than Shops, Ships and Sugar Estates’.

Bookers Sugar Estates proceeded to embark on a wide-ranging programme of community welfare, the provision of extensive health services and introduced a specialist personnel function which, in addition to coping with the six unions of the day, was committed to listening and attending to the more personal disequilibrium each worker might experience. There were then 28,000 employees across ten estates.

At an organisational level there followed the promotion of a highly participative Estate Workers’ Council – intended to be a level playing field on which management and non-management could engage, more than less as equals. The attendant construct was that of human relationships, one in which specialist Welfare Officers were required to play an active role.

What has all of the foregoing have to do with addressing the dilemma of the current male outcry for psychological help, especially for the youth Ms Sam identified? One reason might well be that they lack role models (certainly not available on random TV Screens and Social Media) whom they can emulate. So that the adults in the workplace (fathers, uncles and others to whom they might belong), however distantly, are the messengers, whom the organisation should/could target. This is by no means a new dimension to the role of today’s human resources management, to which the development component is immediately connected. For certain, it has long been a well-established programme in the sugar industry – even before the renowned Chairman and CEO of that international company General Electric, Jack Welch, proclaimed his view that the Human Resources Manager should be both ‘parent and pastor’.

The question now to be asked is: to what extent organisations, public and private, feel any conviction about having a responsibility for analysing strengths and weaknesses of employees with a sensitivity that goes beyond those of performance on the job?

How much provision is made, in the current cliché of a communication environment, for listening to, and interpreting what the other is experiencing?

In the same breath, to what extent also is the related technology getting in the way of truly personal relationships in which feelings can be expressed and assimilated?

The answer which emerges from today’s experience across various types of organisations and systems is that not only too few human resources functionaries have the capacity to recognise the need for, and ability, to display the empathy so profoundly sought; but that the organisation itself overlooks placing such a human development issue appropriately high on the agenda, if at all.

As if we are not all human beings.

Yours faithfully, E.B. John